Oliver Twist and Rosso Malpelo

"Oliver twist" and "Rosso Malpelo":two complementary realities

Start

1. Oliver Twist

6.Rosso Malpelo:Verga next to Dickens

2. the setting of novel

8. The setting of novel

index

3. A time of corruption

9. Themes of the novel

4. The plot

10. The plot

5. Themes of the novel

11. Verga's intention

12. Child exploitation today

What is Oliver Twist?

Oliver Twist is a social novel written between 1837 and 1839 by the famous English author Charles Dickens. It is a piece of literature that depicts the plight of the poor classes in English society. Orphaned, Oliver experiences the cruelty of adults as a child, finding himself the victim of repeated violence in the workshop where he works hard at the age of only 9.In the Victorian era, the novel was not only a form of entertainment, but also a vehicle for the circulation of social and political ideas and the novelists of this period, first and foremost Charles Dickens, felt they had to inform their readers, make them aware of the social evils of the time and social criticism was one of the most important features of Dickens's novels.

The setting of the novel:London

No novelist has managed to represent the vast social landscape of Victorian England as well as Charles Dickens. He set most of his novels in London, a city he knew well thanks to his work as a journalist, which led him to investigate London's seediest neighbourhoods.

A time of corruption

The writer was aware of the material and spiritual corruption of the time, caused above all by the Industrial Revolution, and for this reason he developed a critical attitude towards society, denouncing the terrible conditions in which workers were forced to work, child labour, crime, prostitution and the English legal system towards which he had no sympathy, but he combined terrible descriptions of the misery and crime that raged in the English capital with humorous and comic episodes

click here

+ info

The plot of Oliver Twist

The protagonist flees to London after a series of misadventures and it is there that he meets Fagin, an elderly Jew who leads a group of young thieves. For the first time, Oliver enters a particular family in which the sense of unity is proportional to the amount of loot gained. Fagin will move Oliver towards the path of thievery, but for the unlucky young man, the hit on the house of the bourgeois Mr. Brownlow will not succeed. Nevertheless, the wealthy man will take the boy under his wing, but he will be kidnapped by his old gang on Fagin's orders. The Jew wants to exploit the boy as much as possible so that he can be of help in a new extortion. Victim of psychological harassment by Fagin and his violent accomplice Bill Sikes, Oliver loses every trace of humanity in the eyes of those adults who see him only as a resource to be exploited to the point of exhaustion. It is in fact "the grown-ups", hungry for power and money, who violently take Oliver's person in their hands. His story as well as his suffering do not arouse the real interest of anyone and this devalues the poor boy.

Click here

+ info

The main themes of the novel :

-child exploitation -crime -the cruelty and hypocrisy of Victorian England -Identity (because in the end the protagonist discovers his true nature but simply returns to his original social status because he was the son of a rich man. So we find the theme of IDENTITY AS A RETURN TO TRUE IDENTITY.

Oliver Twist is a novel of strong social condemnation of the spread of crime, the mistreatment and exploitation of children, and the immorality of institutions, particularly the begging institutions created by the 1834 Poor Law. In Victorian England, the aristocratic classes did not need to work for a living, whereas for the bourgeoisie, hard work was synonymous with moral virtue and they considered poverty a sin.

Rosso Malpelo: Verga next to Dickens

Linked to the theme of child exploitation is the famous novella "Rosso Malpelo" written by Giovanni Verga in 1880, which tells the story of a boy called Rosso Malpelo by everyone because of his reddish hair, who worked in a Sicilian quarry.

The setting of the novel

The main place where the story takes place is the mine, with its dark and gloomy caverns, which reflect the existence of the protagonist.The Novella is clearly inspired by the verist canons that were widespread in the second half of the 19th century. second half of the nineteenth century. The work should be seen above all from a socio-economic-political point of view in order to fully understand its themes. political point of view, in order to fully understand its themes: it is the period of rapid industrialisation, in a basically agricultural a fundamentally agricultural country. In the south it corresponds to the agrarian crisis and the beginning of of emigration.

Themes dealt with: same as Dickens

-Child exploitation - Childhood denied - Dehumanisation

The plot

The protagonist is a young boy ostracized because of the prejudices that the popular Sicilian mentality attributes to those with red hair; isolated from everyone, he receives no affection even from his mother and sister, who do not trust him and accuse him of stealing money from the salary he brings to the family. The only one from whom Malpelo receives no offence is his father, Maestro Misciu, and he is the only one from whom he receives affection. Driven by the need for money, the boy's father accepts a job to knock down a pillar, but this ends in misfortune: one evening the pillar falls on him and he is buried under the rubble. Malpelo was there at the time, and this event will mark him deeply. In fact, he becomes more and more ill-tempered and grumpy, transforming his fragility into malice. To replace his father at the quarry, a young boy nicknamed "Ranocchio" comes to work because of his limp walk. The two become friends at once, but a short time later Ranocchio falls ill with tuberculosis and dies. Malpelo, now left alone by his mother and elder sister, takes on the risky task of exploring an abandoned gallery to scrape together some extra money. Equipped with everything he needs, he puts on his dead father's clothes and enters the tunnel from which he will never come out again.

Verga: the same social denunciation as Dickens

So,Verga's intention, through this novella, is to denounce and bring to the world's attention issues such as poverty and the exploitation of minors,like Dickens,particularly in the underprivileged classes in Sicily at the end of the 19th century, a reality with which the writer was familiar, but which also emerged from the investigations of the recently formed Kingdom of Italy.

Through the story of Rosso Malpelo, Verga expresses all his pessimism, his hopeless conception of life. Malpelo does not rebel against the injustices he suffers because they seem inevitable to him: if he dreams of rebelling, he immediately returns to what is real and unchangeable from his point of view. The pessimism expressed by Verga in Rosso Malpelo is absolute, it knows no way out, it leads him to think that never having been born would have been better.

Child exploitation today

We can therefore conclude that child exploitation is a problem that has persisted for a long time.Today,child labour is between 2 and 10% of the global workforce in some areas of Latin America and Asia,and exceeds 10% in some countries of the Middle East.In the days of Dickens and Verga,child labour had as direct consequences not only illiteracy but also the onset of important pathologies in children. Fortunately, today child labour legislation is closely related to school legislation: compulsory schooling and the presence of children at school protect them. Today, child exploitation is officially illegal almost everywhere, but there are still cases where families themselves exploit their children to increase their monthly loot.

+ info

THANKS

Made by: Giorgia Zampieri